Not surprisingly, 76,000 people in the United States died from diabetes in 2014 according to a CDC report. Diabetes also contributes to deaths from other causes, namely heart disease, the leading killer of Americans. Statistically, a 50-year-old with diabetes will die six years earlier, on average, than someone without diabetes according to the American Heart Association.

There’s One Common Denominator That’s Being Ignored

With a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, it seems the main focus is always on the pancreas. In fact, many practitioners will tell you that you’re diabetic because of pancreas isn’t working properly or making enough insulin. The pancreas’ job is to disperse hormones to regulate your body’s production of insulin. However, when the pancreas doesn’t do its job correctly, there’s often a failure in the assembly line of organs that support it, especially when there’s a diagnosis of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.

Don’t Blame The Pancreas

Part of the relationship between diabetes and heart disease has nothing to do with pancreas directly. Here’s what your practitioner is not telling you -- type 2 diabetes is a liver condition. It’s the liver having trouble backing up the pancreas that’s causing your prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. With so much focus on the pancreas, the lack of liver function often gets ignored. However, this is what leads to heart disease.

The liver is the second most abused organ in the body, next to the stomach. The liver’s main responsibility is to create balance in the body. The liver has many jobs. One main job of the liver is to process fat, breaking it down and releasing it as an energy source. That being said, eating too much fat can put a tremendous strain on the liver and bile production, especially in prediabetics.

The liver is the hoarder of vitamins and minerals, and glucose and stores them for later use. In fact this is how the liver backs up the pancreas. When you haven’t eaten for hours, your liver releases glucose in just the right amounts to relieve stress on the pancreas and ensure a steady production of insulin.

The liver is also the filter of the blood, cleaning it before it goes to the heart. Your liver is always working hard for you neutralizing all the toxins that enter your body each day. These toxins are environmental toxins that come from plastics (BPA) pesticides, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals. There are also herpetic viruses that house in the liver such as the Epstein Barr Virus.

When the liver neutralizes toxins it is in essence making them safe. If it can’t take these toxins and convert them to make them safe because it’s getting run down, the liver does what it does best -- it stores them away to protect, but this is short-lived. Storing toxins isn’t a good thing for the liver and this is where you start to see other problems.

Why There's Weight Gain

Once the liver is clogged up, you will begin to see weight gain, usually around the middle of the waist. This is, incidentally, one of the most dangerous places to gain weight when it comes to heart disease. This means the liver has become sluggish and stagnant. The weight gain happens because these are toxins/poisons in the liver that can’t be converted.

This Is When High Cholesterol and High Blood Pressure

When the liver gets clogged, it’s ability to filter the blood slows down. This may lead to a high cholesterol or high blood pressure reading because again, the liver is unable to fully do its job.

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Your blood thickens because it’s improperly filtered by your liver. This means the heart needs to work a little harder to draw the thickened blood up to it. This is in part what high blood pressure is.

In short, you’ve now got a sluggish, stagnant liver loaded with toxins that’s causing you to gain weight, isn’t releasing glucose as a back up to the pancreas, and isn’t properly filtering the blood that goes to your heart. As a result you’re diabetic, nutritionally deficient due to your sluggish liver’s inability to store vitamins, your liver’s got a buildup of fat (fatty liver) resulting in high blood pressure and/or high cholesterol. Now you’re heading toward heart disease.

You To The Rescue! It’s Payback Time.

At this point your doctor may be saying, “Your A1C is a little off the charts.” This happens when the liver is just too beaten down to function and not having that balance anymore, or knowing when to release glucose or not, is at the root of this diagnosis. However, having enough glucose released by the liver and into your blood stream stops the stress on the pancreas and the whole insulin resistance process, reversing prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.

At this point you are the only person who can help your liver to get back to its efficient working status. For all the work your liver has done for you, it’s time for you to do some work to get it functioning properly again. This is how you will reverse prediabetes and type 2 diabetes and thwart heart disease.

You must drastically lower the fat in your diet, even if you’re on a plant-based diet. Understand that fat is a great oxidizer of toxins in the tissues of the body, especially when it comes to heavy metals. In a sense, fat slows or even stops the flush of toxins from the body allowing these toxins to house in our tissues, where they oxidize or bleed off their toxicity into the body. This is one main reason you want to lower fats in the diet and increase anti-oxidants, so that you can “anti-oxidize” those poisonous toxins and help your body to eliminate them. Doing this will ultimately restores the liver, reverse diabetes and save the heart.

Where Fatty Liver Comes From

If your diet is high in fat and your liver can’t process that fat anymore, it needs to produce excessive bile. The excessive bile production happens because the liver can’t handle the load anymore, and it can’t handle the fats anymore. This is where the pancreas having a problem.

The liver then starts hoarding again only it’s storing the fat away to protect your pancreas. This is fatty liver. You should know the liver takes the fat in, to protect you, just like it does with scar tissue, but in the process of protecting you, the glucose flow stops.

Bring on the Carbohydrates!

If you’re diabetic, carbohydrates may be a bad word, but consider this: Your practitioner-recommended high protein, high fat, low carb diet is what’s likely gotten you into this fatty, stagnant, sluggish liver predicament in the first place. It’s time to change course. Eating high quality carbohydrates reverses fatty liver, prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.

High quality carbohydrates are essential in healing the liver and all of them include glucose. You might be saying “But I’m a diabetic I can’t have glucose.” You can. These are the good sugars – the sugar your liver needs to restore its reserves to help the pancreas. These are the good sugars your brain and muscles needs to function. These are the sugars that are missing from your life and the natural sugars you need more of. These are the good sugars that are relatively low on the glycemic index.That being said, if you’re currently diabetic and you can bolus to eat pasta, pizza, processed foods and other junk, you can certainly bolus for some of these natural foods. The great thing is that you might not have to.

Sweet potatoes score low on the glycemic index (44) and even lower (11) if they’re boiled. Sweet potatoes are extremely healing to the liver. Sweet potatoes high in antioxidants such as beta carotene. They’re high in vitamins C, E & D, as well as minerals such as manganese and iron. Sweet potatoes are also high in potassium, which helps to lower blood pressure by drawing out sodium and regulating water retention in the body. You would do well to get into the habit of eating two small to medium sweet potatoes at lunch with a green salad every day.

Fruit is high in antioxidants. Studies show that antioxidants help reverse fatty liver. It goes without saying that fruit is super high in anti-oxidants, especially berries, grapes, cherries and melon. Bananas are anti-viral and fill you up longer because they contain protein. Citrus is also incredibly high in anti-oxidants and fiber, which is why citrus should always be eaten, instead of juiced, especially if you’re diabetic. This allows the release of natural sugar to be lower avoiding insulin spikes.

Honey, especially raw honey, is powerful medicine, especially raw honey. Raw honey is nature’s probiotic, loaded with enzymes and the good bacteria that protects the gut. What’s more, after a short spike in glucose levels, raw honey magically stabilizes blood sugar in diabetics

In understanding the relationship between diabetes and heart disease, it’s important that these “good sugars” find their way into your liver to help heal it. The liver desperately needs glucose to keep the assembly line of organs that keep you well running smoothly. This is one of the liver’s most important jobs. It has to have glucose to save your pancreas to stop diabetes, so that when you don’t eat, you don’t have a pancreas crash, and you don’t get hypoglycemic.

Therefore, lowering fat in the diet protects the liver, rebuilding the store of glucose in the liver protects the pancreas, the adrenals, and protects you from hypoglycemia, insulin resistance and ultimately protects you from developing heart disease.